Hitachi Unveils Lumada Internet of Things Core Platform

SANTA CLARA, CA--(Marketwired - May 10, 2016) - Hitachi Insight Group, the new global group responsible for driving Hitachi's global unified Internet of Things (IoT) business and strategy, today introduced Lumada, an IoT core platform. Integrating proven commercial technologies from across Hitachi's portfolio, Lumada is a comprehensive, enterprise-grade IoT core platform with an open and adaptable architecture that simplifies IoT solution creation and customization. It incorporates expansive expertise in operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT), blending powerful and proven data orchestration, streaming analytics, content intelligence, simulation models, and other Hitachi software technologies. Lumada accelerates synthesizing of actionable insights, delivering faster time to value and supporting better decisions that lead to real world outcomes, like increased productivity and safety, streamlined processes, reduced operational costs and carbon footprint, or improved quality of life. The platform will serve as the core foundation on which all of Hitachi's IoT solutions are built and will enable the creation of IoT business ecosystems.

Digital transformation is a key initiative for many public and private sector organizations looking to optimize processes, implement broader efficiencies and improve interactions with their customers and constituents. As such, the application of IoT solutions that can deliver valuable insight to support transformation is rapidly becoming a strategic imperative in almost every industry and market sector. However, building IoT solutions that provide real value can be difficult -- especially without the right underlying architecture or the deep understanding to properly simulate and digitalize operational entities and processes. IoT platforms are necessary, but often introduce new layers of complexity and rigidity to IoT solutions, making them difficult to modify and incapable of holistically supporting all the elements of digital business and market ecosystems at scale.

Lumada was specifically designed to address the challenges associated with IoT solution creation leveraging Hitachi's rich OT and IT expertise and technologies. Its uniquely open and adaptable architecture makes it broadly applicable for a wider array of industries and use cases, providing an extensible, flexible platform from which Hitachi and its customers and partners can easily tailor solutions or co-create.

"IoT platforms unquestionably have an important role to play in the development and deployment of IoT solutions. However, they can introduce new layers of complexities, which can hinder the implementation and benefits of the solutions themselves," said Christian Renaud, research director, IoT, at 451 Research. "While it is still very early days in the IoT platform market, the landscape is crowded, making it difficult for new vendors to differentiate themselves. Hitachi's extensive expertise in OT and IT gives them a unique understanding of the fundamental requirements to build and deploy IoT solutions at scale. This allows Hitachi to help customers get actionable business insight that translates into real business value, faster."

Lumada provides a comprehensive framework of key IoT solution building blocks, including edge device and connectivity integration, application integration, data integration and orchestration, data repositories, stream and batch data processing, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, simulation tools, repeatable solution blueprints, and enterprise services.

Integrating Hitachi's decades of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) expertise with proven technologies from across its portfolio, Lumada provides three key qualities that set it apart from other IoT platforms in the market today:

• Open: Lumada offers an open, flexible architecture that simplifies integration with complementary technologies from Hitachi's IoT partner ecosystem and provides an extensible foundation from which to build solutions for a variety of industry applications. It was specifically designed to encourage and support open innovation, co-creation and accelerated solution development with Hitachi's partners, global system integrators (GSIs) and customers.
• Adaptable: Lumada provides a more flexible approach to IoT solution development. Its heterogeneous architecture allows it to support a range of IoT applications and partner technologies to support more highly agile environments that are easier to build-on and extend. This provides